Saturday, May 21, 2016

Investigators searching for wreckage from EgyptAir Flight MS804 may face similar problems to those seeking the missing Malaysia Airlines jet — including tough terrain on the ocean floor and deep, heavy seas, experts said Friday.
Floating debris and personal belongings have been found in the Mediterranean Sea, Egypt's military said, but the hunt continues for the rest of the doomed plane including "black boxes" that could yield vital clues.
Key parts of the Airbus A320 have likely sunk to
the seabed and could be hidden by ridges and underwater volcanoes as
high as the Alps, according to Simon Boxall from Britain's National
Oceanography Centre in Southampton, England.
"This is still a very inaccessible part of the
planet," Boxall told NBC News, adding: "Oceans are very good at keeping
their secrets."

Hunt for EgyptAir flight 804 intensifies :

Even modest seas represent a big challenge for searching

While the Mediterranean is usually associated with sunshine and
balmy waters, the sea where the jet is thought to have crashed — about
180 miles north of Alexandria, Egypt — is deep and often choppy.
"The depth in that area is in the region of 1.8
miles, which is significant and not much shallower than the area in the
Indian Ocean where they are looking for [missing Malaysia Airlines
flight] MH370," Boxall said. "We are not talking shallow waters … this
is well below what divers could reach."
Flight MS804, which was traveling from Paris to
Cairo, disappeared from radar screens early Thursday with 66 people on
board. Officials say it descended rapidly from cruising height, making a
sharp left turn followed by a 360-degree turn to the right.

Area of the crash in the GeoGarage platform

290 km North of Alexandria (according Egyptian Army)

EgyptAir MS804 wreckage may be on one of the deepest parts of the Mediterranean.(courtesy of MarineTraffic / video)

"Any substantial parts will likely by now be on the seabed which in
this area is quite rocky with mountains and lots of ridges," Boxall
said.
"It is not a simple area in which to search and recover things
from the seabed. The assumption is that the Med is sunny and calm but
I've worked in that area and when it gets rough, it gets very rough."
The faster debris can be recovered from the
water, the more experts will be able to discover about what happened to
the plane, former NTSB air accident investigator Greg Feith told NBC's
TODAY.
"As long as it doesn't get washed ... as long as
the exposed parts aren't continually being washed either by wave or
tidal action or any kind of grit or sand on the bottom, there should be
[explosive] residue ... that forensic folks can actually determine
whether or not there was an explosion or ... some sort of deformation
due to overload or some sort of breakup of the aircraft."

Swath bathymetry of East Mediterranean

International bathymetric chart of the Mediterranean (IBCM) :

thickness of the Plio-quatenary sediments (IBCM-PQ)

The difficulty of the task will also be determined by the speed and angle at which the jet entered the water.
"If the aircraft hit the sea directly then it
will have broken up under the sheer force of impact, but if it was a low
angle of approach there could be large sections relatively intact,"
U.K.-based consultant marine archaeologist Tim Akers said.
"Natural
buoyancy could keep some of those parts afloat for a good few days."

Sentinel-1A detects slick

The Sentinel-1A radar satellite detected a slick in the eastern Mediterranean Sea – in the same area that EgyptAir flight MS804 disappeared early morning of 19 May 2016 on its way from Paris to Cairo. Sentinel-1A acquired this image later in the day at 16:00 GMT (18:00 CEST) in ‘extra-wide swath mode’ of 400 km with horizontal polarisation.

ESA provided it to the relevant authorities to support the search operations.

The 2 km-long slick is located at 33°32' N / 29°13' E – about 40 km southeast of the last known location of the aircraft. Although there is no guarantee that the slick is from the missing airplane, this information could be helpful for the search.(courtesy of ESA / closer view)

Despite the difficulties, the search for MS804
has several advantages compared to the fruitless two-year hunt for
MH370.
Authorities quickly had clear picture of where there plane was
last seen, compared to the case of MH370 in which it took days to piece
together clues from satellite data.
"The search is much more limited — a small
fraction of the area being covered in the Indian Ocean," Boxall said.
"Not only that, but it is in a busy shipping area and is within the
flying range of helicopters. The MH370 search area was three days away
from the nearest ship and search planes had to turn back for fuel after
only a couple of hours."
The Mediterranean Sea is also heavily mapped —
in contrast to the uncharted southern Indian Ocean where MH370 searchers
had to spend weeks building up a profile of underwater mountains and
other potential hazards before sonar searching could begin.

The speedier search also increases the chances that experts can
identify the battery-powered "ping" signal from the aircraft's bright
orange cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder.
"The black boxes will still be 'pinging' if they
haven't been damaged and it should still be a clear signal," Boxall
said.
"It would seem to be a case of 'when' the wreckage is found,
rather than 'if.'"